ENTROPY MEASUREMENT OF LINKOGRAPHY IN PROTOCOL STUDIES OF DESIGNING

Abstract. This paper explores the use of information theory to measure linkography in protocol studies of designing. It outlines the ideas behind using Shannon’s entropy as a measure of opportunities for idea development in team designing. The entropy measurement can be used to assess a whole design session or it can be used to evaluate the progress of a session by taking incremental measurements. Two cases are used to illustrate this method. The paper concludes that this method is able to assign signatures to design sessions that characterize the opportunities for idea development. 1. Protocol Studies in Designing According to Akin (1998) the first formal protocol analysis that study designing was conducted by Charles Eastman (1969). Eastman’s study contributed to the current understanding of what architects do when they design in the form of a information process model. Eastman’s view had been challenged by Schon and Wiggins (1992) which suggested designing as a reflective conversation with material, that the basic structure of information flow is interactive. Cross (2001) gave a summary of design cognition from the results of interdisciplinary protocol and other empirical studies of design activity in the past thirty year and asserted that protocol analysis has become the most likely method to study cognitive activities of designers. Dorst and Dijkhuis (1995) suggested there were two types of protocol studies namely process- and content- oriented protocol analysis to capture the two different paradigms mention above. Linkography was first introduced to protocol analysis by Goldschmidt (1990) to assess design productivity of designers where she suggested linkograph acts as a bridge between the design process and the design product for assessment (Goldschmidt 1992). In a way this method bridged the process and content oriented protocol analysis of designing. The following section gives a summary of linkography relevant to this paper, readers should refer to Goldschmidt (1990, 1992) for further details of this method